


A Trick of Light

by bzedan



Category: Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, Fights, Metahumans, writing the fic I didn't write in high school
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 07:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20926082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bzedan/pseuds/bzedan
Summary: Charlotte is a meta, and mostly law-abiding. But old habits die hard.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> When I was in high school I didn't know fanfic and OCs existed, but now I do and I know better fits for an OC who was my teenage self-insert into the X-Men universe.

Charlotte had been worried that they were going to check her credentials when she applied for the tutoring job but they didn’t. She had hoped they wouldn’t. Part of the application process included tests in the subjects you were applying for and Charlotte knew that even people with college degrees didn’t always know the subjects they’d paid money to learn. A candidate who knew their stuff was worth hiring whatever their background and if they were also smart enough to lie in their application, then the tutoring centre could politely pretend it was true.

Not that Charlotte hadn’t gone to college, she just hadn’t finished. She’d done every single required class for her major but only half of the other credits needed to graduate. By then, Charlotte had spent three years and signed a lot of loans and was done trying. Now a woman in her thirties, adult Charlotte was angry nobody had been watching over college Charlotte. Adult Charlotte was also impressed that she’d gotten that far—even followed by a couple months to get certified as a CNA—considering how completely stoned or drunk she was most of the time.

All that to say that enough had happened between when young Charlotte would have earned those degrees and now, that when the tutoring centre called her to offer a job, she’d thought they had the wrong number.

It wasn’t like it was a full-time job, nothing Charlotte did was, but it meant she could dial back on some of the side gig jobs a little. It was nice. Charlotte had a schedule, her own room in an apartment, a month ago she got her one-year chip and maybe soon she’d even be able to open a savings account. A shining ribbon of possibility was strung through her days, which is probably why she didn’t panic when she slipped up in front of a student.

Zoe was smart, sometimes unsettlingly smart, but even the smartest kids ended up in tutoring to shore up subjects they didn’t shine in if their families had the money for it. Zoe was, as she’d told Charlotte while rolling her eyes, “A comfortable B in writing, and colleges want an A.” She quickly became one of Charlotte’s favourite students. Her writing was solid, she just hadn’t learned to edit yet.

The two were huddled over a red-lined essay one afternoon, Charlotte’s pale, amber-brown fingers darting across the page, showing where two paragraphs could be swapped to smooth out a transition. She’d let down her guard and was tired, so when she gestured the chunks of text moved, changing places like an educational animation. After a horrified pause, Charlotte slapped her hands over the page. Guiltily, she met Zoe’s eyes, which had gone wide before narrowing in the sly way that always meant trouble in teenagers. Charlotte took her hands from the paper, revealing the paragraphs in their original position. With a smile, Zoe casually leaned back in her chair, playing with the charms that looped through one of her wrapped braids.

“I see what you mean, Miss Flores. Thank you for explaining it so clearly.” She pointed at another section of the essay. “What about this? I don’t get exactly how this needs to be fixed.”

By then, Charlotte had collected herself. She used her red pen and her hands and no tricks as she explained the next set of edits. To her credit, when she realised she wasn’t going to get a rise out of Charlotte, Zoe returned her attention to the session and seemed to have a good grasp of the concepts by the end. Even so, Charlotte felt uneasy and had trouble concentrating with the rest of the day’s students. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Zoe so much as she didn’t trust herself. She hadn’t been this sober or stable for a very long time and felt like she was always low-key waiting for the other shoe to drop. She hoped Zoe wouldn’t bring the incident up again but knew the teen wasn’t going to let it go.

Before going to her evening gig, Charlotte stopped at her apartment for something to eat. The woman she rented her room from, Bonnie, was a nice enough person who was probably never going to put Charlotte on the lease. Bonnie was also Charlotte’s sponsor in group and Charlotte credited her current sobriety with the fear of disappointing her own personal bogeyman: a petite white lady in her early 50s who was blonde going platinum, twice divorced and somehow able to rent a two-bedroom apartment despite having no obvious job. Charlotte had incurred Bonnie’s wrathful disappointment exactly twice and never wanted to experience it again. She’d been sober before but this time she was sober with a vengeance.

Charlotte grabbed one of her pre-made sandwiches from a clearly labelled tub in the fridge and brought it to her room. She took bites while changing out of her work clothes, listening to a ‘90s girl-pop playlist that felt like it belonged on a CD that had hearts drawn on it in Sharpie. Thanks to hand-me-downs from others in group, she’d cobbled together a decent Lady Teacher wardrobe, but her own clothes felt better in every way. Charlotte thought about the evening’s gig for a moment before picking out black leggings, a tie-dyed soft mesh tunic and a deep pink cropped sweater that read “Muñeca” in neon sign-style letters.

The leggings had been one of Charlotte’s first indulgences once she’d had a steady paycheck. They were as thick and opaque as pants, hiding panty lines and leg hair while never bagging at the knees or wearing thin where her thighs touched. They were even the right length for her short legs. Charlotte had four pairs and felt like a king.

With another twenty minutes before she had to leave, charlotte queued up a YouTube makeup playlist and practised, sitting cross-legged in front of the full-length mirror propped up against a wall. Each step the influencer took for her “Summer Fuego” look, Charlotte copied. But, instead of sponsored eyeshadow palettes and three shades of foundation, Charlotte used light. A sweep of her fingers or a moment of concentration and her face was painted in perfect, flawless layers. The video ended and Charlotte paused the playlist, not looking away from her reflection.

She tried to hold what she looked like in her mind, then closed her eyes. Keeping her eyes closed, Charlotte scooted around to face away from the mirror. Opening her eyes, she counted to ten and turned back to her reflection, peering. The appearance of the makeup had held, sort of. Like always, her facial features seemed distorted. Her nose was someone’s idea of her nose, her eye colour was wrong and there was an overall sense of uncanny valley realness.

With a sigh, Charlotte relaxed and her face swam up through the illusion, minus the “Summer Fuego” look but with all of its pieces their familiar selves. To cheer herself up, Charlotte did her favourite exercise, running her fingers over her hair while it changed colour. It was an equally embarrassing and joyful trick because she was absolutely imitating a scene from  _ The Craft _ and it made her feel very cool but very old.

Even if she couldn’t make something stick unless she was looking at it, Charlotte consoled herself by remembering that if she was looking at a thing she could get it perfect. Her phone buzzed with a text and she grabbed it while she stood, dropping it on the bed while she tied a scarf over her hair and buckled on a grey leather fanny pack. Another, more insistent, buzz rattled her phone and Charlotte texted back while slipping on her shoes.

“Down in jiff ei”

A typing icon popped up, cycling for a few seconds before disappearing. Charlotte laughed as she went out the door. The idiots could try to lecture her on time tables all they wanted, but they couldn’t do the job without her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlotte's side-gigs are a touch different than her tutoring job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: gunfire, metahuman powers used to cause physical damage.

The crew, unlike Charlotte, wore all black in a cross fit, weekend tactical vibe. She’d tried to explain a dozen times that it was the most suspicious thing they could wear but they persisted. She figured it was what made them feel cool and protected, as though slim-fit cargo pants were a hand of glory.

Charlotte watched while one of the white guys—Matt, maybe? —picked the lock. Out of the dozen people she’d worked with in these crews were three brown-haired white guys all named after New Testament prophets and even though Charlotte tried, out of politeness, to keep them straight, she couldn’t. That was another downside to the crew’s uniform, it was far easier to remember people if you had a sense of their personality through clothes. As it was, she had a feeling that even if all three of those boys wore their favourite jeans and graphic tees, Charlotte would have had trouble telling them apart. The lock popped and the group moved, Charlotte casually strolling in their midst while the others did things like check corners and make hand signals. It was cute, how they all acted as though they weren’t invisible.

Even though she still struggled with retaining small details without concentration, the flashy big tricks like invisibility or mirages had been the core of Charlotte’s repertoire for years. She could do them hungover or drug-sick and had, more often than not. Whether she was making something disappear or making it look like there was something there took the same trick of the light.

When she was first messing with invisibility, she’d made the crew—not this one, but people long dead or lost to prison and born-again cults—individually invisible. It’d been a mess since nobody could see where anybody else was. Eventually, Charlotte figured out how to make a bubble of invisibility they could move around in. It took almost no thought at this point and only cost Charlotte the effort of looking around at the things they walked past. She didn’t even have to pay excessive attention to detail, human eyes accepted a lot of inconsistencies and most security cameras, looked at by human eyes, accepted even more.

Their group went down a series of halls, three very alert and gym-fit professionals and one short, athleisure-clad, square-built brown woman in 4-inch gold hoops who cheerfully gawked at the painted cinderblock halls. Jad, an Amazon of a woman with deep warm brown skin that reminded Charlotte of autumn leaves, reached the door first. Charlotte didn’t know what they wanted past the door but had paid enough attention during their briefing to remember that there was a door. Doors were annoying because she had to make it look like it was closed while Mark or Matt or whoever picked the lock and they all did the thing where they moved at full attention, guns pointed to cover every possible angle. It wasn’t difficult, just irritating to keep track of all the variables.

Charlotte waited until Jad waved her on, and she quietly entered the room first, getting what visual info she needed. Managing her team’s little bubble as she crossed the threshold was the easiest part of the process because Charlotte could maintain an illusion of invisibility around her own body reflexively. She crossed the threshold thinking about how nice it would be to have a savings account for the first time in her life when she saw the ambush.

A half-dozen very capable-looking tough-guy types were positioned around the room, barrels of their weapons pointed at the invisible but incredibly vulnerable body of Charlotte.

“What’s taking them so long?” An angry whisper rasped from behind one of the guns. Charlotte realised that to the people in this room, the lock had been jimmied but the door hadn’t opened. With a nervous combination of speed and stealth, Charlotte backed up, stumbling into Joel, an unsettlingly tall blonde man who always had an excess of knives strapped to him. To Joel’s credit, he caught Charlotte before she fell, even though she elbowed him very hard as she flailed. They were quiet, but not quiet enough, and Charlotte saw a half-dozen barrels swivel towards the noise and she panicked.

“EYES!” Charlotte called, hoping her team could figure it out. The room filled with a burst of light, as if a silent flashbang grenade had gone off. Pushing back against Joel, Charlotte kicked the door closed on yells of pain and dropped to the ground, pulling Jad and Joel with her. Even blinded, some of the toughs in the room sent off a few rounds recklessly and the team flinched closer to the floor.

“What was that?” Matt hissed.

“Ambush.” Charlotte quickly glanced at everyone’s eyes but nobody seemed to have the stunned, pinpoint pupils of someone blinded by a flash.

“We should go.” Jad was up and moving as she spoke and Charlotte scrambled up quickly, smoothing the edges of the group’s invisibility as she caught up. They made their way back through the halls in the same formation as before, but with haste ruffling the edges of their unity. Nobody tried to stop them as they left, which Charlotte hoped was because all the fighting bodies were blinded in the failed ambush.

They were nearly out of the winding halls when they heard the thud of footsteps running to catch up. Charlotte stopped after they rounded a corner, the others moving quickly enough they were almost around another bend before realising she wasn’t with them.

She waved them on. “I’ve got this.” Charlotte waited until their pursuers came into sight and the hallway lit up like a summer day, cheery light shining from what looked like tiny suns around each pursuer’s head. Two got off wild shots, but all of them were screaming. Charlotte turned away, the light fading as she left. Joel looked down at her as she caught up, shrugging loosely before putting away his knives. Nobody else approached as thy left and reaching the car felt anti-climactic.

“It’s possible I didn’t keep us fully masked there, near the end.” Charlotte apologised while she struggled to buckle in. Unlike the crew’s outfits, the car fit the neighbourhood, which meant it was just old enough to have finicky seatbelts. She looked up, watching a glance between Jad and Joel in the front seats. Matt-or-Mike was in the back with Charlotte and was eyeing her openly. She felt tired. Not from using her powers, but from being old and wanting a drink she couldn’t have. She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, listening to the rumble as Jad started the car up.

Eyes still closed; she spoke into the silence of the vehicle. “I didn’t want you to shoot anyone, it was mostly a reflex.”

“Have you done that before?” Joel’s voice held genuine interest, without any tinge of morbid curiosity about metahumans.

“Yeah, it’s like looking at the sun during an eclipse unprotected, only worse, I guess.” Charlotte paused before answering his unasked question. “They’re definitely blinded in a non-repairable way.” She felt the air in the car change. It was something that had happened before, would happen every time Charlotte showed how her powers went beyond party tricks. She opened her eyes and stared out the window until she saw her building roll up.


End file.
